Foraged Ingredients Are the Focus of This New Beer

We are always open to trying new beer flavors, techniques and concepts. A beer from Los Angeles’s Highland Park Brewery recently caught our eye—a brew made from ingredients foraged from their backyard.

The Yard Beer features ingredients that founder and brewer Bob Kunz was able to find in the yards of residents and businesses in his brewery’s Highland Park neighborhood.

No, he’s not likely to stumble on a ton of barley or hops in the urban jungle of Los Angeles, but he is able to find enough herbs and fruits to give the saison-style beer its unique aroma and taste. Last year’s Yard Beer was spiked with lemongrass, rosemary, sage and eucalyptus leaves. This year, Kunz is hoping for a more citrus-focused iteration that still features lemongrass but will also include sour flower and various varieties of lemons and limes.

TheLos Angeles Times’s Daily Dish caught up with the brewer as he prepared this year’s batch of foraged beer. It seems figuring out how to use these unpredictable foraged ingredients can be as hard as finding them. “My own sensibility tends toward more subtle flavors, but if you list an ingredient in a beer’s description, the customer is going to want to taste it,” Kunz told the Times. “It’s a balancing act.”

It makes sense that customers would want to taste the ingredients—they may have come from their own backyard.